Dynamic Scheduling of Flexible Manufacturing Systems

To date, group scheduling research has primarily focused on examining the performance of different group heuristics under various experimental conditions. However, the dynamic selection of group heuristics has not received sufficient attention from researchers. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate a mechanism for the dynamic selection of group heuristics from several candidate alternatives by exploiting real time information from the Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). In this regard, two tools, viz., Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Simple Multi-Attribute Rating Technique Exploiting Ranks (SMARTER), are used to develop models for part type and family selection. The experimental results indicate that the performance of the proposed models are better than the common group scheduling heuristics under varied experimental conditions.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

A Generic Mechanism for Repairing Job Shop Schedules

Reactive repair of a disrupted schedule is a better alternative to total rescheduling, as the latter is a time consuming process and also results in shop floor nervousness. The schedule repair heuristics reported in the literature generally address only machine breakdown. This paper presents a modified Affected Operations Rescheduling (mAOR) approach, which deals with many of the disruptions that are frequently encountered in a job shop. The repair of these disruptions has been decomposed into four generic repair actions that can be applied singularly or in combination. These generic repair actions are evaluated through a simulation study with the performance measures of efficiency and stability. The results indicate the effectiveness of the mAOR heuristic in dealing with typical job shop disruptions.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Reactive repair tool for job shop schedules

10.1080/0020754042000270412International Journal of Production Research4311-23IJPR